One afternoon in the lockdown Summer of 2020, I was in our garden when a propeller plane flew noisily overhead. It reminded me of a book that I had read in my teens - George Orwell’s ‘Coming Up for Air’. For some reason, memories of this book had surfaced most summers. Or, more precisely, what had surfaced is one image - of being in the tranquillity of a peaceful garden, a tranquillity that is interrupted by the ominous roar of a plane flying overhead.
I must have mentioned this to Angela, and expressed some regret that I no longer did much reading, as our son sent me a copy of this novel as a birthday present later that year, the day before he went into hospital. I read it quickly, much of it in the course of a disturbed night, an attempt to stop myself worrying about how his surgery would go. I looked forward to discovering the scene I had remembered, and finding out about the context - what it was that made my memory keep returning to it.
The main character, George Bowling, turned out to be a pompous, 45 year old insurance salesman, who despises almost everyone, particularly the women, in his life. On one occasion, he stalks a woman who looks vaguely familiar to him, before realising that she is Elsie Waters, the girl he first had sex with as a youth. His reaction combines disgust and self-satisfaction.
”Only twenty-four years, and the girl I’d known, with her milky-white skin and red mouth and kind of dull-gold hair, had turned into this great round-shouldered hag, shambling along on twisted heels. It made me feel downright glad I’m a man. No man ever goes to pieces quite so completely as that.”
I had no memory of this obnoxious man. All I had remembered is someone in a garden, hearing a plane overhead and worrying about what is to come (it’s set in 1938).
Much of the first half of the novel is taken up with Bowling’s recollections of his life growing up before World War One in an Oxfordshire village. What he remembers most vividly is the process of no longer being “a kid”, but joining a gang and becoming a boy - “it’s all bound up with breaking rules and killing things,” he notes. He sees living animals as things, and it’s pretty much the same with girls. He describes Elsie Waters as "part of the picture” of his life before the war, but the picture he sees does not extend beyond a body to be used - “As soon as you saw her you knew you could take her in your arms and do what you wanted with her..…In her black dress she looked - I don’t know how, kind of soft, kind of yielding, as though her body was the kind of malleable stuff that you could do what you liked with.”
There’s a lot of killing. Birds nests are raided, eggs and chicks are thrown to the ground and trampled on, adult birds are catapulted, and spawning toads are captured, penetrated with a bicycle pump, and inflated until they disintegrate. Fishing becomes a lifelong obsession. “Killing things - that’s about as close to poetry as a boy gets,” Bowling reasons. “Thank God I’m a man, because no woman ever has that feeling.”
Killing is on his mind again in 1923, soon after he marries Hilda Vincent. For the first two or three years of marriage, he has serious thoughts of killing her, because, in his eyes, his wife is becoming ‘a depressed, lifeless, middle-aged frump”. He doesn’t act on these misogynistic fantasies, though, because he believes “chaps who murder their wives always get copped.”
These insights into patriarchal conditioning as recollected by the adult Bowling are illuminating, though perhaps not in the way Orwell interpreted them. But I had not remembered them. I suspect that in my teens they may have helped me understand why I so loathed the hyper-masculinity that suffocated me at my single-sex school - literally, in one traumatic incident, when an older boy lured me into the biology lab where he was dissecting a dead animal. I can remember a foul smelling damp cloth close to my face, my head being forced down between his legs, and the sight of his orange coloured pubic hair. But I have no memory of what, if anything, happened next, except having to struggle to breathe.
Planes, bombers to be precise, feature a lot at key moments in the novel. Above a railway train, above a cemetery, above a market square. But never above the garden of my memory. Indeed, there doesn’t seem to be a garden. Only bare patches of grass surrounded by privet hedges in the dreary housing estate where Bowling lives as an adult, and the woods and ponds he frequented as a child. And a disparaging reference to vegetarians who, he believes, have rock gardens with concrete bird-baths and red plaster elves.
Coming Up for Air is what Bowling feels he will experience if he re-visits the village he grew up in. Here, he anticipates that he will re-connect with a more stable and peaceful way of life that typified, he imagines, life ‘before the war’ - a life that was more embedded in nature (as if the unquestioning sexism and brutality towards living creatures that he gloried in was somehow peaceful and respectful of nature). But Bowling’s village has grown into a town, almost unrecognisable now, with a factory making bombs on its outskirts. The woods that he remembers are no longer there, and the ponds have been filled in (one of them now a rubbish dump). He realises that everything has changed, and that there is no escape from what is to come.
I returned to this novel that I had read in my teens, to discover that what I remembered had not been there, at least not in the way I remembered it. And to realise that most of what was there I had not remembered.
What did resonate for me on re-reading the novel, though, is not only my dimly recollected experience in the school biology lab, but something I only discovered long after I first read it, in the papers that my mother left when she died. In the Summer of 1944 she had to be admitted to hospital, immediately after a bombing raid on the South Coast port town where she lived. It was feared that the shock of the nighttime bombardment might cause her to miscarry, but this turned out to be a false alarm.
I came into the world that Winter.
I am in the middle of a complaint against me in my therapeutic practice. It is being investigated by my professional body, who have made a pig's ear of the process. Reading this piece by Alan Neale resonates with me because of the plane's continuing presence in his life.
I hope I will be able to come up for air. I am presently drowning in the swamp my professional body have pushed me into.
have just ordered coming up for air (and the clergyman's daughter). have read the big orwells but not the little ones. so thank you for piquing my interest.